Long-time friend o' Blue's ^Drag0n^ sends along his discovery of a solution for a problem causing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to crash with a "Skyrim has stopped working" message. In his case he traced this back to the use of ThreatFire Antivirus. Here's word:

It looks like the PC version of Skyrim is not something that PCTools Threatfire likes. Threatfire causes the game to crash at the launcher when you hit "play" with no message, other than "Skyrim has stopped working."

How did I figure this out? I had a similar problem with CoD: World at War a while back which made me think Threatfire might be the issue.

The easiest way to fix the issue is to just uninstall Threatfire completely.

You can force-quit Threatfire from the process monitor, but you also have to force-quit ALL other ThreatFire/PC Tools modules to make that work (please note that you will have to reboot or open Threatfire from the Start menu to get it running again after doing this):

yonder wrote on Nov 13, 2011, 18:06:Kudos on picking this conflict up. Hopefully this antivirus is worth the repeated issues its cause. I'm fine with my avast for now.

As for Skyrim crashing, if I may speak for the silent majority, I've played 27 hours and have had it crash once. Part of that might be because I'm in the silent minority with a killer rig. I haven't heard lots of complaints of Skyrim crashing (due to the fact that most of my time is spent playing Skyrim) but it can't be nearly as bad as, say, Fallout New Vegas.

Yeah, once I figured out it was ThreatFire buggering the thing up, I haven't seen crash one in the game since. It's actually been remarkably stable.

It's kind of sad that we have to have so many layers of security to protect our data and identities; definitely one of the many downsides of firewalls/AV--not knowing if the problem is really the game, or something your AV thinks the Game is doing that it shouldn't.

Parallax Abstraction wrote on Nov 13, 2011, 18:17:Good catch. I've worked with almost every anti-virus there is in my career and I've never heard of ThreatFire. Is this popular?

Sorry I missed this one.

I wouldn't say it's popular, but it does come bundled in PC Tools AV, or is free if downloaded independently.

The rub on it is that it's a Day Zero heuristic monitor that looks for 'suspicious application behavior' and stops it when it occurs. The downside is that it looks like a handful of games (CoD:WaW, Skyrim, and some PunkBuster-enabled titles) take exception to what it's doing and do not launch. They just stop.

PC Tools is aware of these issues, but it involves a level of cooperation with the authors of the code triggering a false positive, most of which don't seem too inclined to jump on addressing the issue.

Not surprising, because as you pointed out, there just aren't a lot of people that use ThreatFire. I'm just disappointed that the studios don't at least test for this or make people aware when an issue becomes known.

Hudson wrote on Nov 14, 2011, 09:15:People that use anti virus programs are just as retarded as the ones that spend 80 dollars for Norton to "protect" their machines and then have it just break everything.

I've had to fix many a machine from people taking that stance. Once you plug a virgin machine into a network, it takes about 20 seconds before machines start getting pinged with known Windows exploits, per what I've seen monitoring IP traffic where I work with EtherApe and Wireshark.

20 seconds before every hacker in China, Russia, and god knows where else starts flooding your network until something works. NAT helps to a degree, but it won't protect you from them all.

Personally, I'm just not that cavalier with my personal data, and someone calling me a retard isn't going to change the fact that it's just plain stupid to run an unprotected machine and expect to retain any degree of security whatsoever.

I've never heard of ThreatFire. I use a free antivirus program provided by a large software company that I know and trust not to provide updates that will prevent my machine from booting <cough> AVG <cough>.

verrul wrote on Nov 14, 2011, 07:39:the game engine is different. the combat has nothing to do with the engine. the lighting and shading are the engine which have changed and improved. You can take the same graphics engine and make a 2d iso game that would look completely different.

Yeah, the lighting and shading are the "the" engine. Sure, whatever you say mate.

the game engine is different. the combat has nothing to do with the engine. the lighting and shading are the engine which have changed and improved. You can take the same graphics engine and make a 2d iso game that would look completely different.

Just to pipe in, finally managed to find the time to install the game yesterday.

Steam gave me some trouble (havent used it in ages) but once it updated and I set the download speed it patched the game fairly quickly.

Running on default High Settings, (with AVG Free running in the background) no crash to desktop in 4-5 hours of playing and I even managed to ALT-TAB a few times without my PC crapping out, which is a first for Bethesda games yay!

Gotta say my first impressions are a mixed bag, the visuals are impressive enough but Im kind of dissapointed they are still using the Gamebyro engine, its prettier than before but the movement, physics, combat its all instantly fammiliar to anyone who played F3 or Oblivion.

The new perk tree fits nicely with the regular skill system and is a good adition.

The UI is a mess and it took me quite a while to get used to it. Also am I the only one who liked Acrobatics and Athletics? Im missing those skills

So far Id say its better than Oblivion, but not as good as Morrowind was.

Been using the free Security Essentials on mine and anyone else I know with no problems. There are several other very good free AV's out there too.

Anyone saying Security Essentials uses up processor cycles has a screw loose. Even a friends ancient Vaio rarely goes over 2 or 3% cpu use. I certainly would not take any IT recommendations from anyone saying otherwise.